Computer investigation has become increasingly important as the use of computers has extended to virtually all areas of everyday life. Computer investigation may include, for example, computer forensics which entails the collection, preservation, and analysis of computer-related evidence. Computer-related evidence is increasingly being used for court trials and police investigations.
The gathering of desired information during a computer investigation session often requires generating machine-readable search queries. Such machine-readable search queries describe the information that is sought to be retrieved from a target machine. However, the generating of search queries using a traditional query language is often confusing and complicated for non-programmers. For example, traditional search queries may require multiple Boolean expressions, multiple levels of parenthesis, and the like. Traditional search queries are therefore hard for a human with little or no programming experience to interpret and understand.